It is my pleasure to inform you that your article "Interoperabilidad: ¿se impondrá el verdadero formato universal de ficheros?" ("Interoperability: Will the Real Universal File Format please Stand Up?"), published in Novática issue no. 184 (November-December 2006), is one of the five articles that have been selected by the Jury of the 2nd Edition of the Novática Award, that will be presented to the best paper published by our journal in 2006.

Roberto Di Cosmo was the winner for his paper "Las publicaciones científicas: el papel de los Estados en la era de las TIC" ("Scientific Publications: The Role of Public Administrations in The ICT Era"), published in Novática issue no. 181 (May-June 2006). We congratulate Roberto.

Gary Edwards & I originally wrote the paper for PJ at Groklaw who rejected it. I can't remember why but she is a good & tough editor. So is marbux (marbux contributed substance in the legal analysis and some other parts, so he should be on the by-line and named in the diploma too).

In my opinion, it is one of the clearest and well-defined pieces the OpenDocument Foundation collaborated on.

UPGRADE is The
European Journal for the Informatics Professional, a bimonthly
technical,
independent, non-commercial, and freely distributed electronic
publication.

Don Marti was Editor of LinuxJournal during its long and important middle phase. He's now back at LinuxWorld.com as Senior Editor.

MP3 (24:02)

Don & Gary Edwards and I spoke together a few weeks ago about the GPL-ing of Java and the conversation turned to our file format work on ODF at the OpenDocument Foundation. This led to the LinuxWorld Podcast, which Don recorded late last night after my return from Boston.

Hiser...

"We have to stop being coy...if we're serious about the success of Linux in the market-place -- either desktop or server -- we have to be realistic about aggressively attacking some of the choke-points these gorillas are exerting..."

Don's questions were excellent -- they're questions we've been hoping to field from the Linux sector for years now. I ramble through the points (am fixing that), but the conversation represents our views clearly,and hopefully for a wider than usual audience.

This is a reminder to friends and enemies that I am scheduled for trash-talking in a public place (Boston Sheraton) at 1:30pm. Theme is "The ODF Plugin for MS Office" in which I'll show the fine work of my colleagues at the OpenDocument Foundation.

The demo will be of the proof-of-concept Plugin, "da Vinci" version, which would provide 100% fidelity to the MS Office document formats from Office 97 - 2003. Background info on the ODF Plugin is here, at fr0mat.net, the beta blog of the OpenDocument Foundation, where you'll find some screenshots that may help orient you to what this Plugin thing is all about.

I have a few bon mots and Shakespeare couplets, which I'll hold unless the room is really rocking. We'll see.

I precede a panel with folks from Propylon, Really Strategies & XyEnterprise which I'm very much looking forward to: a group of XML professionals who will be discussing XML workflow case examples in the publishing and perhaps other fields.

In addition to its successful synthesis of the timeline and the grasp you get of why the Commonwealth is doing this, and how this poor company, Microsoft, is struggling to catch up, what stands out from this piece is the sense of confidence in the inevitability of the universal, portable document. The Commonwealth Executive Branch CIO, Louis Gutierrez, has it; and many members of the ODF community have it, but it is rare to see this confidence reflected in the press -- who have been very reluctant to see the common sense in a trend which would destablilize the status quo, and shake-up lazy-minds.

In the piece, Louis Gutierrez highlights the message of Gary Edwards, President & Founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc., 501(c)3 [the author is an officer of <ODf/>]...

"The standard is about the format, not the application versus
application," he said. "It's really a pointer toward something that
Gary Edwards [founder and president of the OpenDocument Foundation] is
very compelling in his discussion of -- we are heading toward a
document-centric world and moving away from an application-centric
world. It's going to be much more important how we structure, store and
have workflow with standardized document forms than whether I'm using
this or that version of this or that office productivity app."

CIO Gutierrez hits the fundamental points...

"You look at this and you say, 'Right now, we all rely on the Internet
with its TCP/IP standard, and, boy, it's just like running water,'" he
said. "That wasn't always the case, and in the early days, we used to
wander around with different networking schemes, topologies and means
of trafficking over the wire. Now we've come to a standard. It's not a
vendor-specific standard, and it just works."

"The direction of this standard is almost self-evident," he said. "It
really is compellingly useful and interesting to have governments start
to traffic in open, standardized, XML-based document formats.

"To the extent we think of this as enabling the documents, that any
given person at their desk saves, to better interoperate in broad-scale
workflow, archiving and indexing -- that's when things get exciting and
interesting," Gutierrez continued. "That's really the ultimate play
here."

I'll reiterate: "The direction of this standard is almost self-evident."

Yet the process of getting state government to recognize the opportunity is slow. Minnesota is pursuing an open file format legislation initiative. Peterson quotes Minnesota State Representative, Paul Thissen, who introduced the legislation (HF 3971)...

"People, generally, in government have vague ideas of what open
standards and open source are, but they don't understand specifically
what the implications of those things are," Thissen said. "An education
piece is important, which is part of the reason we wanted to raise it
this year, and we're doing some work with local newspapers as well to
write opinion pieces to educate the general public on how important
this is."

So the persistent education about what just happened in Massachusetts will be ongoing -- and redundant in at least 49 discrete instances -- before the new new thing becomes the most widely agreed safe choice.

Disability groups in Massachusetts and Microsoft's army of lobbyists and its network of disinformation agents have sparked up a new round of FUD against The Commonwealth's ETRM 3.5 open standards policy.

Microsoft is scared shitless of The Plugin, a piece of software that will install on Windows and with MS Office to enable MS Office to work with files in the OpenDocument format. The Commonwealth last week issued a Request For Information to find out if any such software exists (this is customary procurement policy to ensure all vendors participate), and there was at least one interesting response in the affirmative from The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. 501(c)3 (of which this author is a member).

So far, the FUD contains the same old factual errors we saw spreading around last Fall which are comical in their lack of depth but difficult to set right in the public mind: confusing open source with open standards; confusing standards policy with procurement policy; and setting up a negative framing of the issues.

Bob Sutor does a great job addressing one piece of FUD in particular from The Initiative for Software Choice -- another Microsoft-sponsored Astroturf organization. As the name suggests, The Initiative for Software Choice is about keeping choice AWAY from software markets.

Yeah. There's just no way to posit with any sense of self-worth that ETRM 3.5 is a pro-open source policy. It's an open standards policy; and Microsoft HATES those when they interfere with the company's control of markets its control over household and enterprise budget decisions which always flow into their avaricious, gaping and drooling mouths. Hell hath no fury like a corrupt corporation scorned.